Chapter Text
There is peace in the seven kingdoms after the reign of fire, terror and blood. Bodies barely gone, still that crimson tide staining the ground beneath them and crows not yet begun to pick at the juiciest meats while the players on the board of the game of thrones continue to move their pieces. Sacrificing queens as pawns to move others forward on the field. Bishops crumbling. Rooks and knights, standing their ground the same as they always have—the power behind them changing from blue to red, and now as blue again as the veins beneath the Targaryn queen’s skin who sits the Iron Throne.
I am but a mongrel, a dog—the left hand of the throne. The terrible Hound. But I have never served any master but one, the Dark Stranger who lives inside my secret places. The shadow that is only quieted under the deluge of a sour Dornish red.
And by the maze of sanguine silk in Sansa Stark’s hair.
He likes her, the Dark Stranger. He lashes out at her, says things to her, makes dark confessions and she smiles like the sun and thanks him for his attention. Every proper courtesy observed even when he speaks of death, of men dying in agony, their intestines spread like summer sausage across the dirt. I enjoy her as well, the pretty little bird and the sweetness of her songs. The cream of her skin and the cherry blossom pink of her lips.
For the brush of those lips against ours, we’d tear down the Red Keep with our bare hands.
There are times when I hate the pretty chirping bird. I want her chirps and songs for me alone. Yet, she tilts her face up to the Dark Stranger, wets her lips in expectation the same as she does for me. She wants us both. She wants my arms, my touch, but she wants his too. His strength. His brutality that’s hidden inside me. She thinks he will keep her safe.
I have not kissed her yet, though she swears the night of the wildfire I took some kiss like a knight in a story. She doesn’t make this last comparison, but we hear it in her voice. She wants to believe it. He hungers for her, to push her down and ride her like a common whore and in the dark, when I fuck into my fist, I dream of the same.
I wonder if she’d still sit next to me and offer me bites of her lemoncakes with her ridiculous dainty fork if she knew how I thought of her. How he thinks of her. If she’d run screaming, crying—afraid. Or if she’d look at me with those guileless blue eyes clear as the stream Gregor drowned our sister in and pull up her skirts in blatant, yet still somehow innocent, invitation.
Today, I have no time to ponder this. She’s meeting with the septon to make her private offerings to the Seven.
That pious, self-righteous pile of offal who could have helped Sansa a hundred times, could have offered her sanctuary from the Lannisters and kept her safe. That pig who performed her wedding to the Imp and demanded she be stripped naked and insisted on inspecting the bride’s virginity for himself before her wedding.
For a large man, I move quietly through the passages and catacombs beneath the Great Sept. Much business has been conducted in the tombs of the Sept. Kings were born there, sacrificed there. As were traitors and usurpers.
As will be septons who betray their flock.
I’m going to kill them all, those who have betrayed my bird. The Dark Stranger is hungry and there is no better meal for him. In this, he and I are not so different. I hunger for their blood and screams as well.
Yet, I am distracted by the soft, mewling cries in a hidden passage. I would have ignored them if they hadn’t sounded familiar.
I find the lever and the wall slides away to reveal a secret dungeon and chained to the wall is the great whore queen, Cersei Lannister.
The Dark Stranger purred, pleased that she isn’t dead. Pleased that she’s here for our pleasure.
“Hound,” she sounds strangely relieved. “I knew you’d find me. Loyal dog until the end.” Her eyes weren’t cold emeralds, but warm with their need.
Her nakedness was offensive, her ribs defined through the thin veil of skin that sagged from her bones. Her teats were shriveled and those pretty thighs that men wrote sonnets about and sang horrors about the toothed beast that lay between, were brittle sticks. Her skin held the pallor of death, and sores around her wrists and ankles had been torn open by her shackles, tinged black where the flesh had gone necrotic. The stench of her infection, the filth that was on the inside now burned as brightly on the outside.
“My lady.”
“Free me and then kill the septon,” she demanded in a raspy voice.
I smiled. “That’s exactly what I intend to do.” She’d be free when the screaming stopped.
She’d been bound to a strange apparatus that could be pulled out of the wall and turned horizontal. I could tell from the marks on her body she’d been brutalized by the guards. But that wouldn’t break Cersei.
Quickly scanning the room, I saw everything I’d need was already present. As if the Seven had planned it this way. Or maybe the Dark Stranger.
I pulled the apparatus out and she strained in her chains for a moment, until she realized I made no move to release her bindings.
“You want me to pay you? Is that the only way you can get pussy, Hound? All right then. You know I’ve always been curious.”
The bitch was offering herself to me? I wouldn’t have fucked her with Robert’s cock when she was Queen of the Realm. I could help but laugh.
“Why are you laughing?”
I didn’t answer her. I drew my sword and dragged it gently from the tip of her throat down to her belly.
“You like games?” she asked, desperate. “We can play.”
“Yes, let’s.” I pushed the point into her soft flesh, just barely breaking the skin over her abdomen. “Truth or Consequence?”
“What?”
“How about just consequence?” I nodded, very pleased, the Dark Stranger purring a cheerful tune inside of me like a happy lion. An ironic comparison, I know. “You tried to kill Sansa Stark.”
“How does that matter?” she cried, still not understanding her situation.
“Time to pay the piper, as it were, dear Cersei. Your cunt won’t save you this time.” I didn’t feel the need for any long explanation. I didn’t care much if they knew all the details of why I was killing them. Eventually, they all feared the end of all things and the pain I’d give them on their journey there. Didn’t matter why.
I made a shallow cut from hip bone to hip bone. I would have liked to tear her wide, to root out that filthy nest inside of her that had spawned Joffrey, but he was dead now and so too would Cersei be as well.
She screamed this time and when her mouth was wide open, I shoved the smallest of the rats I’d caught inside her bellowing hole head first as far as I could go. It tore at her face as it struggled, it’s claws ripping into her cheeks and lips. I didn’t think it possible, but her screams intensified, or maybe that was just the honest terror behind them.
I dropped two more rats on her belly and I secured the washing bowl over them with a leather belt one of the guards had left. It was one of the more creative methods I’d learned in the SaltPans. Eventually, even if Cersei pushed the one of her mouth, the rats beneath the ceramic washing bowl would try to get out any way they good and flesh was softer than ceramic.
Although, before the septon died, I’d have to make sure he sang a prettier song than my little bird and told me everyone who knew that Cersei was beneath the Sept. They’d all have to die too and the rats would finish off any evidence she’d ever been there.
As Cersei screamed, I decided I deserved a treat for a job well done. The Dark Stranger agreed. Perhaps a taste of lemoncake off of the Lady Sansa’s plate? Or today, maybe even her lips if she offered them to me, tilted her face up with that feverish, innocent adoration in her eyes and her soft breasts brushing against my forearm.
She expected me to keep her safe and I would—such was the covenant between a sworn shield and his lady.